Bringing up the bodies: the reasons people move relatives’ graves

We carry the dead with us. They remain in our hearts, in our minds. Now, the Ministry of Justice has revealed that some of us go as far as physically carrying the dead. For a few years, the government department has received around 25 applications a week from people looking to exhume the buried remains of their relatives.

This might call to mind images of satanic rituals under the cover of darkness, but the main reasons are practical and domestic. People moving from one side of the country to the other apply to have the buried remains of their parents (it’s usually parents) moved with them so that they can better attend their graves. In order to do this, they have to fill out a 12-page MoJ application form that includes the written agreement of whoever is in charge of the “cemetery, churchyard or crematorium where the remains are to be reburied or cremated”. Applications are then normally decided within 20 days.

The idea of a portable grave is not something that sits easily with the Church of England. “The permanent burial of the physical body, or the burial of cremated remains, should be seen as a symbol of our entrusting the person to God for resurrection,” a spokesman told the Sunday Express. Once we are in the cold ground, we have been laid to rest and prepared for our passage into the realm beyond. A 300-mile trip up the motorway is not going to help matters.

The cemeteries themselves seem less concerned. A spokesperson for Brompton cemetery in west London said: “If a family wants to exhume the remains of a relative then obviously we try to help as much as possible.” Other council-run services confirmed this approach. Their duty is to who owns the plot.

At Brompton at least, if a plot is emptied, it continues to belong to whoever owns it. Usually, that means the relative of whoever has been removed. So they can leave it empty or keep it free for someone else.

However, if your relative found their way into an exclusive cemetery, you are unlikely to want to remove them from it. “We have no experience of that here,” someone at the historic private Highgate cemetery told me when I asked about exhumation.

Remains are not always exhumed to be reburied elsewhere. The MOJ says that other common reasons include the scattering of cremated remains, the cremation of buried remains, the moving of remains to another part of the same burial ground and the reinterment of remains in the same grave, normally so that family members can be buried side-by-side.

All sensible reasons, but ones to consider carefully, particularly if you are God-fearing. The dead, now hopefully at peace, are not lightly moved.